The Bowen Island Community Foundation’s Featured Artist Program highlights Bowen artists and their talents for the community to enjoy.
2024–26 Featured Artist Fae Logie’s work often explores the intersections of landscape, environment, and place—themes that echo the community’s shared priority around environmental stewardship, identified in the 2023 Vital Conversations report. Like many on Bowen Island, she shares a deep concern for the changing natural world—a concern that registers in her Arctic Works series of photographs and sculptures.
The Arctic holds many complex and layered associations: it has been the homeland of the Inuit people for millennia; the object of intense colonial exploration and scientific study; the inspiration for artists such as Lawren Harris, whose iconic northern landscapes came to symbolize a national identity; a site of geopolitical tension around sovereignty; and an ecosystem at the forefront of climate change, with warming seas, shrinking glaciers, and species in peril. In Arctic Works, Logie engages with these layered meanings, exploring both the beauty and the fragility of the North.
Stranded, 2021
polymer resin, stainless steel, neoprene, cast metal
111 x 12 x 12 in.
photos courtesy of the artist
In Stranded (2021), Logie responds to the spectre of loss in the Arctic environment. She casts dozens of replicas of a single cetacean vertebra and stacks them atop a nine-foot metal rod whose height corresponds roughly to the length of a female beluga. Although the sculpture evokes the form of a museum skeleton there is no lifelike pose—this skeleton “has no definition, no distinct tail or ribcage, no scapula or skull,” as the artist notes, and conveys an unsettling disconnect between it and the original creature it represents. The rigid armature that holds the vertebrae is the opposite of a beluga’s flexible neck and spine. By multiplying one bone to stand in for the whole creature, the work suggests a painful attempt to reconstitute it from a salvaged fragment before they are all gone.
Baffin Bay, 2024
photomural
40 x 60 in.
photo courtesy of the artist
In the large-scale photo work Baffin Bay (2024), Logie shifts from species to landscape, depicting a moment in the life of an iceberg recently calved from the Croker Bay Glacier in eastern Lancaster Sound. The image—actually a collage of two exposures taken moments apart—is one of majestic stillness: a mass of ice suspended at the intersection of sea and sky. Yet it also embodies the essential anxiety at the heart of climate change. We know the berg is slowly melting and will eventually disappear; we worry about the ocean’s capacity to regenerate itself, to sustain glacial cycles vital to the Arctic environment.
Logie’s Arctic Works prompt contemplation and reflection—and also remind us of our connection with the ocean and its inhabitants. The works are a call to remember our stewardship of the natural world and our need to sustain that connection alive and whole.